I’ve been mentally toying with the idea of setting up a dual boot so I can run linux for a while now. My laptop freezes up with Vista all the time. So that was a reason to do it. Also I do rails development and Windows is definitely considered a ghetto. Support for latest features isn’t always there and I found myself more often than not settling or searching the web for a workaround - but I usually found the workaround. Well a couple of weeks ago I ran into something I couldn’t do on Windows - I needed the latest version of merb - and it just would not run on windows. So… I was ready to bite the bullet and install dual boot, etc. when I remembered VMWare Player - well let me tell you it is awesome. I now have a fully functioning linux dev env running in its own window!
One thing, it does take up a chunk of cpu - so yesterday I was multi-tasking - I just closed the player w/o shutting down the linux virtual machine - today I opened it again - and it restored the state perfectly! Even after a physical reboot! That is incredible software! I love this stuff - and its free, I cannot believe it.
Update - when the system is restored the time is out of synch - so this command brings it current
sudo ntpdate pool.ntp.org